How to Fix a Slow Internet Connection

Video Transcript

"In this clip we're going to show you how to fix a slow internet connection. I'm not employed by or affiliated with any of the websites or products demonstrated today. One of the first steps we should take to speed up our internet connection is to go and run a scan using one of any number of different virus type scanners. And scan for Trojans and viruses, etc. Anything that'll potentially try and rob your system of resources. So, what we've done here is we've told it to do a complete scan of our system, and it's proceeding to do that. Here we see that on this particular computer we had five hundred and eighty nine thousand, seven hundred and ninety eight items scanned. One of those turned out to be a tracking cookie, which is actually fairly benign. Even so, we'll probably go ahead and erase this off our system, make sure that that isn't a potential issue with our performance. Okay, another step we can take is to uninstall programs we don't need. Here we're going to do that. And you should uninstall unused programs because they take hard drive space, which slows your computer. Basically you should look for anything that piggy-backs on your internet connection that's not necessary, like tool bars, etc. It'll also slow down your internet connection substantially. Another important step would be to go and open your control panel, and, of course, each operating system will have a slightly different way of getting there. So, click that and open it up. Go in the control panel to your performance information tab. Now this may vary depending on your operating system, but if you check your help menu, it'll tell you what to open in your particular operating system if it differs. Here we're going to go over and open the Disk Clean-up tab, and we're going to select in this case Files From All Users in this computer. And then it'll tell us....it's going to start the Disc Face Clean-up Manager, and we'll click Continue. It's going to say, "Do you want to clean up your main drive," which is generally the C drive, and we're going to say Yes. Now that the disc clean-up is finished, it tells us how much space is being wasted on our computer by either programs we downloaded and installed, but the download program's still there. Or temporary internet files, or off line web pages. In this case, the person has over two gigabytes of space for hibernation files. De-bug files. So you should go through here and select all these. In this case there's three gigabytes of information sitting in the Recycle Bin. And what the Recycle Bin is, when you delete a program, it'll go into the Recycle Bin unless you have that feature turned off. And that builds up very rapidly. So, we're going to select some of the larger ones here, and, temporary files, again, these are when Windows updates your computer, it'll put files on there, then it installs the files, and sometimes it won't remove all of 'em. Potentially, you'll build up quite a lot of wasted hard drive space as a result. Those are the only ones we're going to select here for our demonstration, but you can see just by selecting those, we're going to eliminate almost eleven gigabytes of wasted space on this laptop's hard drive, which is a significant of....of space wasted, and then it'll also slow down the performance for the computer. So I'm going to hit the Okay tab, it'll ask us if we're sure, and we'll say "delete", and the utility will go through and take those files off the computer at this point. And that's how you fix a slow internet connection."